Break out the Periodic Tables! My would-be Cleaner player has a gear request.

[TheTSKoala]

Evidence destruction.  Can be done in any number of ways.  Think any of those ways would be okay for the cleaner type of the group?  Nooo.  Of course not.  She does, however, have an ingenious idea that I figured I would share, possibly so other GMs can use them against their players.

Canister the size of a two liter bottle with carrobend alloy fusing it all together.  At the core, a compressed Nitrogen air tank that will disperse the compressed air quickly, violently in a 360 degree radius.  Packed inside the void in between the container's wall and the compressed air tank, a proverbial 'slew' of Phosphorus, shavings of Magnesium and Caesium.  Timer on the outside, linked to the compressed air. 

Tick, tick, tick.  Clink!  The timer would have some sort of heater inlay on the carrobend to get it to the low melting point.  The nitrogen would trigger, blasting the sides of the tank outwards and spraying Phosphorus and Caesium all around the area.  Phosphorus and Caesium would react with the air, ignite, thus heating and throwing around magma-esque magnesium... ..and the area would burn for quite some time.

Still trying to stat that all out.. but.. it's a really nifty idea.  I gave her a AD for it.

[OverNinja]

Your players are a little more than disturbing with their ideas... I love 'em! 

[TheTSKoala]

Your players are a little more than disturbing with their ideas... I love 'em! 

Yeah, for like.. 5 minutes during the gear prep, she was sketching frantically in her notebook.  Finally after everyone was done, I looked at her and said "Do I even want to know?"... and she hands me that idea.  Complete with an equal sign leading to a fireball.

[Sletchman]

I like it!  Has a nice visual attached to it, and a certain amount of style.  Gotta say though, that looks like it would be dangerous as hell to build [and possibly transport and use too].  What's wrong with just some petrol and a match?  It's not like these chemicals leave no trace and aren't they more strictly regulated than just <supermarket purchased accelerant>, making it easier to find the group?

Rules wise, I'd make it an improvised thermite grenade, probably with a larger blast radius and less AP.  But I tend to play fairly quick and dirty for these kinds of things.

[TheTSKoala]

I do believe her idea for it is the "Last resort:  Someone was here, but they'll never know it was us" device.  And.. yes.  The device would be incredibly hard (near impossible) to build in a timely fashion in a  freelancer campaign.  Amazingly, for once in a very loooong time, the players managed to keep with the Company for longer than the first scenario.  (Even after they pancaked an NPC with a flying PC.)

But yes.  The build would require HAZMAT environmental controlled lab, enivro suits, not to mention the raw materials....

Side note:  It'd also be one helluva cool thing to watch bounce down a highway...

(edit to add Side note:)

[doneatrawhagis]

 I feel like using this for my character...

I can just imagine setting a proximity trigger or remote, even putting a wire on the door to the room. Think Burn Notice where he is accidentally tripped the wire of a claymore, he had to keep the wire tension while slowly getting closer to the claymore. Except he could get killed in a more interesting way.

[glimmerrat]

Caesium doesn't react like that with air. It oxidises, but if you want a BANG, you need to expose it to water. That'll do the trick.

Also bear in mind that Magnesium burns out *really* quickly, so if there isn't anything particularly flammable it ain't gonna go up. It won't even set fire to a wooden table if you burn about a meter of Magnesium ribbon. Trust me - i've tried. Tiny fragments of Magnesium will burn for a second at most before they're completely oxidised.

Of course, getting hold of Caesium is in itself a chore. You can't buy it at a hardware store - you'd need to approach a specialist chemical stockist. It really is very nasty stuff.

That said, it is a neat idea. Is she a chemist, or just someone who paid attention in high school?

[Mister Andersen]

*cough* Thermite *cough*

[Krensky]

Phosphorus covers a multitude of sins.

So does finely powdered aluminium and iron oxide.

[glimmerrat]

So does finely powdered aluminium and iron oxide.

Throw in a magnesium fuse and you've got a nice homemade thermite bomb. I'm not supposed to make them at work, but I do. 

Powdered Zinc will do in a pinch, too, instead of Aluminium.

[TheTSKoala]

Caesium doesn't react like that with air. It oxidises, but if you want a BANG, you need to expose it to water. That'll do the trick.

Also bear in mind that Magnesium burns out *really* quickly, so if there isn't anything particularly flammable it ain't gonna go up. It won't even set fire to a wooden table if you burn about a meter of Magnesium ribbon. Trust me - i've tried. Tiny fragments of Magnesium will burn for a second at most before they're completely oxidised.

Of course, getting hold of Caesium is in itself a chore. You can't buy it at a hardware store - you'd need to approach a specialist chemical stockist. It really is very nasty stuff.

That said, it is a neat idea. Is she a chemist, or just someone who paid attention in high school?

I believe her idea for the Caesium is to super heat the room through the oxygen reaction, making everything very dry.  With the phosphorus & magnesium to create the burn effect.  She's majoring in Biotech, so chemistry is in the course schedule I'm sure.

[TheTSKoala]

So does finely powdered aluminium and iron oxide.

Throw in a magnesium fuse and you've got a nice homemade thermite bomb. I'm not supposed to make them at work, but I do.  

Powdered Zinc will do in a pinch, too, instead of Aluminium.

Not the chemist, and correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a thermite reaction eat through floor long before it set the whole place ablaze?

[Black Cheese]

In middle school, when I started in on RPGs, the science teacher (for whom I was the DM) was adamant that his PC could employ then-contemporary medical techniques (e.g. CPR, wound cleaning with alcohol) in the D&D game I was running. This was, of course, back in, like, '84, so role-playing was new and junk, but even then I knew the difference between what he knew and what his PC knew. And he was big enough to let it go.

Not the chemist, and correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a thermite reaction eat through floor long before it set the whole place ablaze?

...And there you go. Does she want a war-crime-in-a-can? (Yeah, I know it's an awesome phrase--that's Clayton Oliver's quotation.) Have her pick one or build one.

You let the players build one bomb for free, and then the hey-let's-just-build-a-bomb strategy continues forever.

Which, of course, can be totally okay. Explosions = awesome.

[glimmerrat]

Not the chemist, and correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a thermite reaction eat through floor long before it set the whole place ablaze?

Well, it will eat through the floor, but if you use sufficient ingredients to fill a shot glass then you'll get a 6 ft. high geyser of molten metal as it goes off. Sit it on a table and it'll nuke the ceiling and anything within about 5 ft. of the container.

[TheTSKoala]

Not the chemist, and correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a thermite reaction eat through floor long before it set the whole place ablaze?

...And there you go. Does she want a war-crime-in-a-can? (Yeah, I know it's an awesome phrase--that's Clayton Oliver's quotation.) Have her pick one or build one.

You let the players build one bomb for free, and then the hey-let's-just-build-a-bomb strategy continues forever.

Which, of course, can be totally okay. Explosions = awesome.

Well... that's the distinct different between her idea and say a "FAB in a can idea".  She wants the contraption as a counter-forensics device, not primarily a weapon, though obviously it could be.